Intensify efforts to reduce stagnant Ohio smoking rate

In recent years, the explosive surge in heroin and opiate addiction has garnered a lion’s share of headlines in Ohio – and rightly so. Deaths from heroin and other opiates have increased nearly tenfold since 2003, the Ohio Department of Health reports.

In its shadows, however, lies an even more pervasive epidemic that snuffs out the lives of about 17,700 Ohioans yearly.

That epidemic is tobacco. Though the substance remains legal and its devastating effects drag out over years and decades, parallels can be drawn between opiate use and cigarette smoking. Tobacco, like heroin, quickly ensnares its users into a costly and unhealthy cycle of overwhelming addictive behavior. Tobacco, like heroin, takes a tremendous toll on health-care costs and worker productivity losses. And tobacco addiction, like heroin addiction, shows no signs of significant reductions in the near future.

An enlightening report last week from the Associated Press, based on data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, illustrates that Ohio has a long, long way to go toward lessening the scourge of cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use.

Ten years ago this month, Ohio implemented an indoor smoking ban in all public places. Hopes then ran high that over time, it would usher in a marked reduction in the unhealthy behavior. But as the AP reported, smoking rates here have remained virtually unchanged over that 10-year span.

Some 23.1 percent of adult Ohioans smoked regularly in 2007 compared with 21.6 percent who did so last year, well above the national rate of 15.1 percent. And according to the Ohio Department of Health, the rates are significantly higher in the Mahoning Valley.

The Greater Youngstown region of the state weighs in with an adult smoking rate of 32 percent, second only to the lower Appalachian region at 35.2 percent, according to an ODH report titled “The Burden of Smoking in Ohio,” reviewed in June 2015.

That means that Ohio’s landmark smoking ban – the first in the Midwest and the first in a tobacco-growing state – wielded little long-term impact on the 1 in 3 adults in the Mahoning Valley who continue to engage in the life-depriving habit.

BAN AS MERE INCONVENIENCE

Many of them likely share the sentiments of smoker Jerald Taylor of Columbus, for whom the ban has been little more than an inconvenience.

“It’s a ban on smoking in front of certain places and in restaurants, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop smoking.”

No, it does not mean that he and the more than 2 million other smokers in the state must kick the habit. But it does mean that Ohio must continue to double-down on its campaigns to encourage quitting and to thin the ranks of individuals for whom the lure of addictive nicotine-tainted smoke overpowers logic and common sense.

After all, the logic behind quitting is irrefutable. Each year, according to the CDC, smoking kills 480,000 Americans, including 41,000 from exposure to secondhand smoke. It causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and lung diseases. On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers.

That evidence should motivate the chronic smoker to resolve today to begin planning to kick the habit for the new year. But as time and stagnant smoking rates show, many need a little push.

Toward that end, the state health department, working with lawmakers and others, should push a little harder. It could follow the lead of other states by considering various options that include boosting taxes on tobacco products, increasing the tobacco purchase age to 21, and investing more resources into awareness campaigns and smoking-cessation services.

According to the American Lung Association, Ohio spends only a fraction of the $132 million a year on tobacco prevention recommended by the CDC.

To be sure, Ohio’s indoor smoking ban has achieved some praiseworthy goals of lowering the frequency of smoking, lessening illnesses caused by secondhand smoke and of establishing an atmosphere in which smoking is generally regarded as anti-social. But clearly, much more work remains for the ban to reach its full potential of significantly decreasing the ill effects of routine tobacco use. It’s time that the campaign against tobacco addiction rises to the same level of intensity as the offensive against heroin abuse. With adequate commitment and an overarching will to do so, both public-health menaces can be conquered.